MG Mg4 Urban vs Mercedes-Benz E400

What's the difference?

MG needs a win, and the MG4 Urban may be the right car at the right time to give the Chinese brand a major boost.

It has been a rough few years for MG, with sales in decline for the past two years, which has seen it tumble from Australia’s favourite Chinese car maker to a distant fourth place behind BYD, GWM and Chery. 

Part of that could be because of its rapid expansion, both in terms of its total number of models but also the size of the vehicles it’s offering. The larger QS SUV and U9 ute have both received underwhelming responses from the car-buying public.

So, MG has returned to its roots - small, affordable cars. The MG4 Urban, not to be confused with the MG4 Hatch, is its new price-leading electric car and the company’s new management hopes it leads a sales revival.

It is hard to immediately think of a country more suited to the convertible life than Australia. Even our coldest states (you know who you are…) are blessed with more warming sun than almost anywhere else on the civilised parts of the planet, so you’d think we’d be swanning about in dropped-top bliss almost year round.

But it’s actually in the UK (despite being cold, grey and almost always underwater) that convertibles really fly out of dealerships, with sun-starved Brits buying more than anyone else in the world. Weird, right?

Still, here they remain something of an oddity, sold in small numbers to drop-top diehards. At least partly because the convertibles of old were almost always slightly worse than their hardtop equivalents. 

But Mercedes - which makes more convertibles than most - claims to have mastered the soft-top formula with the E400 4Matic, a car it says offers all the perks of open-air motoring without any of the dynamic or practical downsides.